Hackaday.io Just Passed 100,000 Members

Today, Hackaday.io passed 100,000 registered users. It seems like yesterday that I wrote a post about passing 10k but that was last year already! Much has happened in that year, and there is much more to come. Thank you to everyone that makes Hackaday.io great by interacting with each other, posting about what is going on in basements, garages, hackerspaces, and workplaces, and finding new and interesting ways of making the site your very own. Your involvement has made Hackaday.io the greatest open source hardware resource in the world.

We don’t call it project hosting. The seed idea did start as project hosting for the hardware hacker, but Hackaday.io has long since outgrown that pair of shoes. It’s become a self-sustaining reaction that grows ever bigger and more awesome as everyone gets involved and decides how and what they want to do.

One of the major additions to Hackaday.io this year was group messaging. This spawned an explosion of new communities within Hackaday.io starting with the Hacker Channel. Anyone may request to be a team member and will then gain access to the group messaging; there are now well over 500 members. We’ve scheduled many somewhat-formal events on the channel over the last few months that invited people to show off what they’re building and ask for feedback. That evolved into topic-based sessions on things like FPGA design and what you need to know about manufacturing. Many of these were co-hosted by Hackaday Staff and community members.

This bizarre text is part of the itanimulli profile

A curious event on the site was the appearance of the user itanimulli who join and registered the vanity URL: /conspiracy. This is an enigma. The user is a puzzler and has posted a number of images and other challenges that appear to include hidden data. How do you solve something like this? Get all of your friends involved, of course! Thomas Wilson started a project to solve the itanimulli puzzle and posted about it on the stack to invite teammates to the challenge.

Hackaday.io has spilled over into the real world too. Do you ever look at the valuable odds and ends in your workshop that you know someone will use, but you never will? The Travelling Hacker Box is the answer to that conundrum. It’s the “take a penny, leave a penny” of the hacker world. Get on the project and get in line to receive the box. When it hits your workshop, take out something cool but then we want to see you build something with it! Replace what you took with something of your own and send it to the next person. International shipping has not been solved yet for this particular box, but nothing is stopping you from starting an EU version.

The support we’ve seen from the hardware community for Hackaday.io is one of the reasons we’ve set out to do something new. In just a few weeks the first ever Hackaday SuperConference will be held. Two days of talks and workshops let us meet in person the users we’ve grown close to through the site. I hope to see you there. But if not just ping me on Hackaday.io!

Or course 100k isn’t the only interesting number. We’ve got more juicy statistics in the image below.

itanimulli, Just because you’ve found the the Character Map program doesn’t mean your special, or you’ve found out that you can copy/paste text(likely). Please go back to twitch where your kind is accepted KAPPA FACE.

01010000 01001111 01001111 01010000 You’ll never solve this puzzle and you should feel bad!

Hey! Just clicked on the patchwork to get it bigger, and immediately stumbled on my face, there, in the upper left bone/trench.
The amazing thing is that I even don’t remember I used *that* particular photo.

A traditional forum would be a great addition to the site and I don’t get why there isn’t one already. Recruit some moderators from community regulars and instill a real sense of community around here.

Hell. Setup some hosting and I’ll take care of the setup and config. Not even a remote challenge.

Now that there are more then 100 000 users, does HAD plan to stop luring the new users into automatic follow of the same 50 guys? This is happening at the registration moment, when the new user is questioned about his/her area of interests.

Thanks for being a part of this everyone! We are using the Hacker Channel currently in place of a forum- you can discuss your project in real time (makes for some interesting complaining and bragging both!).

No offense but it just seems that a forum would have been a better starting point than .io… a large part of what .io does could be done just as well with a traditional forum package and would have many more features to boot.

Categories, extended profiles, better navigation. Seriously- HaD needed a forum years ago and I just don’t get why it hasn’t been a priority, especially recently with all the acquisitions and mergers. It just seems a forum would make so many things work better from having an idea, to having a question to small-scale marketing of working products, selling bare PCBs or sharing design files.

Even just browsing previous posts- search is broken and at the mercy of the tags the author sets. Just the other day I was looking for a post tagged with ‘gps’ that didn’t show up when I searched so I had to resort to page after page after page after page- couldn’t even jump multiple pages just previous page after previous page.

Apologies for the gripes- just the more I write the more it confounds. A forum jist seems like a shorter, better path to ‘community’ than stacking on top of a blog framework.